1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of transaction card manufacture.
2. Prior Art
As used herein (both in connection with the description of the prior art and the description of the invention), the terms “order,” “order for cards” and similar terms refer to a request for a number of transaction cards which are identical to each other. Cards are considered identical to each other if they are to be identical up through the end of the printing of the cards. Subsequent processing, such as applying to each card distinguishing indicia, such as user names and account numbers, does not change the nature of such cards being identical to each other for purposes of this disclosure. Cards from different orders are non-identical with respect to each other.
Transaction cards, such as credit cards, identification cards, membership cards and the like, when made pursuant to the prior art are typically made as discussed below.
Each order for cards is printed separately from other orders for cards. A sheet of plastic material is sized to fit a number of cards arranged in rows and columns. For example, a sheet may be sized to hold twenty-eight or fifty-six cards, distributed in seven columns of four rows each for twenty-eight cards or eight rows each for fifty-six cards. Other configurations, such as ninety-six cards distributed in eight columns of twelve rows each, may be used depending upon the size of the printing machines. All cards to be printed on a sheet are identical. Sheets sufficient in number to accommodate the cards for a particular order are fed into a printer (e.g., if there is an order for 20,000 cards and sheets sized for twenty-eight cards are being used, then at least 715 sheets are used). Traditionally, silk-screen printers or offset lithographic printers are used for their high quality output. The cards on each sheet are printed virtually simultaneously (i.e., in a single set of passes for the entire sheet). After all the sheets have been run through the printer (and after other steps familiar in the art), the sheets are moved to a cutter (or puncher) where the cards are punched from the sheet, and then they are either moved to the next station in the card manufacturing process (e.g., for identification number embossing) or, for simpler cards, boxed and shipped to the customer.
This prior art procedure works relatively efficiently when orders in the tens of thousands of cards are being processed. The card printer needs to be set up only once to print many hundreds of sheets.
This procedure does not work efficiently when small orders (e.g., for one hundred cards) for specialty runs or for small institutions are being handled. With only four to twenty sheets being printed per set up, the card printing and cutting machines are frequently shut down as each run is completed and a new printing setup must be put in place. The time lost between printing runs and the labor required for each setup make the processing of small jobs much more costly per card than the processing of large jobs.
Some card manufacturers have tried to solve this problem of inefficiency in printing small orders by resorting to digital printers instead of silk-screen printers or offset lithographic printers. The time required to set up digital printers is much less than that required to set up offset lithographic or silk-screen printers, so the time lost between processing orders is much smaller for digital printers. Even so, the inefficiency is still present, and the quality of the output of digital printers is still generally not as high as the quality of the output of silk-screen printers or offset lithographic printers.
In a prior art method used in connection with silk-screen printers or offset lithographic printers, multiple orders are printed on a each sheet of a run and the cards are sorted by human hands after the cards are punched from the sheets. To increase the speed of the hand sorting, the orders are place on the sheet so as to correspond to the sequence in which the cutter punches the cards from the sheet. In such a procedure the punching step must either be slowed to allow for the hand sorting to keep up. In those cases where the cutter punches out all the cards in a row simultaneously, the orders can be arranged on a row by row basis to speed the hand sorting. However, in such cases, the number of jobs which can be printed on each sheet without making the hand sorting very difficult is limited to the number of rows on each sheet. In any event, the prior art method discussed in this paragraph is still slower and more prone to error than desired.